Buffered Crossbar Fabrics Based on Networks on Chip

— Buffered crossbar (CICQ) switches have shown a high potential in scaling Internet routers capacity. However, they require expensive on-chip buffers whose cost grows quadratically with the port count. Additionally, similar to traditional crossbars, point-to-point switching mandates the use of long wires to connect inputs to outputs, resulting in non-negligible delays. In this paper, we propose a CICQ switching architecture where the buffered crossbar fabric is designed using a Network on Chip (NoC). Instead of a dedicated buffer for every pair of input-output ports, we use on-chip routers, one for each crosspoint. Our design offers several advantages when compared to traditional CICQs: 1) speedup, because the fabric can operate faster due to the small size of the NoC routers, their distributed arbitration and the short wires connecting them. This is in contrast to single-hop crossbars that use long wires and centralized arbitration. 2) Load balancing, because flows from different i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CNSR
• Authors: Lotfi Mhamdi, Kees Goossens, Iria Varela Senin
• Keywords: CNSR 2010, Communications, Expensive On-chip Buffers, Input-output Port, Long Wires